Natural by Design
A Landscape Both Wild and Intentional
By Tara Kelly
Photographs by Rana Faure

Off a dirt road in Stanfordville, surrounded by corn fields and forest, Ellen Petersen has created a garden with an eye to the natural. She’s not attempting to tame nature, rather to blend with it.

Which isn’t to say that the hand of the gardener is not evident. “I like to plant one tree a year,” she says. Petersen, a former nursery school teacher, has patience. “I got the Acer griseum [paperbark maple] in a $5 raffle. It was in a quart pot.” The very rare variegated Cornus kousa near the entrance to the house is, she admits, a little too close. It was a tiny sapling when she planted it.

But the signature element is the crabapple orchard, below which are planted mounds of low-growing grasses, ringed by a low stone wall. The effect is stunning. She calls it The Berm.

Petersen was inspired by a small square of the grasses she saw in a garden in the Midwest. “I had already bought Wind Blown Bench and put it where it is now. The wild meadow behind it didn’t look right; it needed a much more delicate texture to set it off. I knew the grass was the right thing when I saw it. It’s Sporobolus heterolepis [prairie dropseed].”

She and her husband, Eric, bought the property in 1981. They were working in New York City and coming up on weekends. “I was already really interested in gardening,” she says. “Hostas, peonies, delphinium—I just love the typical English-style garden. Pretty conventional.”

Everything changed when Eric took a job in Pennsylvania, and Ellen found herself living very close to Longwood Gardens. “I took a lot of courses, learned a lot, and met a lot of people. It took me about eight years. It was really fun.”

“Gardening has changed so much since then. I realized that some of the plants I had might not be so great. Invasive species became the focus. And I started to garden with a consciousness, focusing on native plants.” Petersen embraces the concept of “right plant, right place.” She’s working with nature, not against it.

She likes the look of a big space that’s taken up with one thing. “Last year, quite by accident, the field beyond was all goldenrod. I had a big sweep of that in the meadow. I’m encouraging it to take over that area.” she says. The goldenrod appears by itself, but she planted the yellow Thermopsis (Carolina lupine). “That was six years ago, and it took over. I’m thrilled. I’m going to leave it,” she says.

The homogeneity of “one thing” happens to be a great backdrop for sculpture. She has three distinctive pieces punctuating the landscape. But Petersen’s trees are often quite sculptural as well.

Liquidambar Slender Silhouette, a deciduous sweet gum tree, not much more than five feet wide, is probably at least 30 feet tall. It can grow up to 75 feet in height. But that’s okay. Petersen takes the long view.